There it was. The flinch she couldn't hide, no matter how hard she tried.
Sienna's throat closed. She wanted to say the right thing, wise and comforting, but every professional phrase she could think of felt hollow. Elise didn't need platitudes. She needed someone to acknowledge that this was hard and unfair and that her fear was real, not irrational.
"Do you want to get out of here?" The words came out before Sienna had fully formed the thought. "Coffee. Lavender's. I could use a break and you look like you could too."
Elise blinked. The blank expression cracked, just slightly, and underneath it was surprise and then a grin, quick and genuine, like sunlight breaking through cloud cover. "Now?"
"Now. I don't have another appointment until one."
Elise pushed off the wall. "Yeah." The thin smile turned into the real thing. "Yeah, I'd like that."
They left through the staff entrance and walked toward Lavender’s. Phoenix Ridge in late autumn was beautiful enough to catch Sienna off guard, even after fourteen months of living here. The sky was a clean, cloudless blue and the morning sun threw long shadows across the pavement. The air smelled of salt and jasmine from the gardens along the waterfront path, and the ocean was visible between the buildings, a strip of glittering blue-green that shifted with the light.
Lavender's was four blocks from the stadium, on a quiet, tree-lined street that ran parallel to the water. They walked side by side, close enough that their arms almost touched, and Elise's stride was longer than Sienna's but she slowed without being asked.
"Can I be honest?" Elise said, her eyes on the pavement.
"Of course."
"I'm scared." The word came out flat and unadorned. No deflection, no dry humour. Just the bare truth, offered up in the morning sun. "I'm scared that by the time I get back, they won't need me any more. That Lex will have proven she's better and Mara will adjust the lines and I'll be the player who used to start but doesn't any more."
Sienna's heart clenched. She wanted to lie. She wanted to say that would never happen, that Elise's place was secure, that the team couldn't function without her. But she respected Elise too much for dishonesty, and she'd been around professional sport long enough to know that rosters changed and careers shifted and sometimes the thing you feared was exactly the thing that happened.
Mara's voice was still in her head.There's no rush on Elise.She'd said it without cruelty, as a fact, the way a coach delivered all difficult facts. Sienna kept her face still. She was not going to say that. She would not be the person who said that to this woman, in this café, right now. Some information was medical and some information was Mara's to give, and Sienna knew which category this was.
"You're going to make a full recovery," she said instead. Her voice was steady even though her pulse wasn't. "Your tissue is healing well. Your strength is coming back. And when you return, you'll be the same player you were before the injury, because the things that make you valuable to this team aren't things that a labral tear can take away."
Elise looked at her. The green of her eyes was vivid in the morning light, bright against the dark circles beneath them. "What things?"
"Your game intelligence. Your discipline in the faceoff circle. Your ability to read the play three passes ahead. Your work rate. The way the team trusts you to be in the right place at the right time." Sienna paused. She was crossing a line, movingfrom medical assessment into personal territory, but Elise was looking at her with such open, unguarded hope that she couldn't stop. "Lex is a brilliant player. But she plays a different game than you do. She's explosive. You're structural. The team needs both."
Elise was quiet. They passed a bench overlooking the water, where an older couple sat with a small dog between them, and the dog watched them go with its head tilted.
"Nobody's said that to me before," Elise said. "That the team needs both."
"Then nobody's been paying attention."
The corner of Elise's mouth lifted. Not a full smile, but the ghost of one, and Sienna's chest expanded with a feeling that had no business being there.
Lavender's was a small café with pale purple walls, whitewashed furniture, and a counter display of pastries that changed daily. It was certainly the local lesbian hangout although Sienna never quite felt like she fit, she always felt welcomed. The owner, a woman named Lavender with silver hair, greeted them. Sienna had been coming here since her first week in Phoenix Ridge, drawn by the good coffee and the window table that overlooked the street.
They ordered at the counter. Sienna got a flat white and a slice of lemon and poppyseed cake that looked too beautiful to eat, golden crumb and a thin drizzle of icing. Elise ordered a long black and a toasted sandwich, one-handed, struggling slightly with her wallet until Sienna reached over and held the card reader steady for her. Their fingers brushed, Sienna's knuckles against the backs of Elise's fingers, and the contact was brief and accidental and Sienna's skin remembered it for minutes afterward. She pretended not to notice.
They settled into the window table. The sun came through the glass in a warm rectangle that fell across their hands and thewooden surface between them. Elise sat with her sling resting on the table edge and her long legs stretched under the chair, and Sienna sat opposite with her cake and her coffee and the increasingly persistent awareness that she was having a meal with a woman she was attracted to and calling it professional support.
"How long have you been playing?" Sienna asked.
Elise turned her coffee cup in a slow circle on the saucer. "Since I was eight. My mom couldn't afford the equipment, so she worked extra shifts to pay for it. Twelve-hour days, then she'd drive me to practice at six in the morning." She paused, the cup going still. "She never complained. Not once. Even when the car broke down and she couldn't afford to fix it and she drove me to practice with the check engine light on for three months."
"She sounds incredible."
"She is. She's the reason I play." Elise looked out the window. A woman walked past with a pram, and a cyclist wove between parked cars. "I got a scholarship to college. First person in my family. My dad cried, which he never does, and my sister Sophie was furious because she's two years older and she'd applied for the same scholarship the year before and didn't get it." A brief smile, warm with memory. "She's over it now. Mostly."
"And after college?"
"Minor leagues for years. Grinding it out, playing in front of two hundred people in arenas that smelled of hot dogs and bleach and stale beer. Sharing hotel rooms with teammates and eating gas station sandwiches on the bus between games. Then the PWHL happened and suddenly there was a path. A real one. A league with contracts and salaries and crowds that actually cared." Her voice had shifted, the quiet stripped out of it, pride in its place. "I was one of the first players signed to the Valkyries. Before Lex, before the big crowds, before the TV deals. I washere when this team was nothing, and I helped build it into what it is."
The pride in her voice, quiet and hard-won, made Sienna's throat tight.
